WASHINGTON, D.C. - Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry started it, but President Barack Obama's reelection team and the Ohio Democratic Party plan to join in the attacks on GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney over job losses.

There's an Ohio connection when it comes to the matrix of Romney's former equity investment firm, Bain Capital, handsome investor profits and some employee job losses. And that connection will be ripe for exploration, says Jessica Kershaw, Ohio press secretary for Obama for America.

The connection includes Bain's purchase and subsequent move of Sealy Corp., the mattress maker that had been based in Cleveland. Bain and other investors bought Sealy in December, 1997.

Within months of its acquisition, Sealy was reporting a loss of $32.2 million compared with $1.2 million in net income in the same period a year earlier. It attributed the loss to the restructuring of debt and equity in connection with the Bain purchase, and to expenses for accelerated vesting of stock options and other employee compensation, according to Plain Dealer reports at the time.

By March 1998, Sealy, under its new ownership, announced it was moving its headquarters to North Carolina so it could be near the nation's furniture manufacturing center. State and local North Carolina officials offered $600,000 in incentives to make the move attractive.

This affected the jobs of about 130 employees who worked in the Halle Building on Euclid Avenue. Another 15 were affected at a Sealy research and development center in Middleburg Heights.

The company said it offered all the workers the right to relocate or take severance packages. A North Carolina newspaper subsequently reported that 45 Ohio workers made the move.

In another Northeast Ohio deal, TRW, then based in Lyndhurst, sold its information services business in 1996 to Bain and a partner, Thomas H. Lee Co. The deal was valued at more than $1 billion. The spun-off information company was renamed Experian Corp.

Bain and its partner held Experian for two months. They sold it to a British firm for $1.7 billion and cleared profits of $200 million each after paying off their investment and loans.

Additionally, employees of several central and southwest Ohio companies were affected by Bain deals. Those details were first reported Wednesday
by Columbus Business First.

Bain bought KB Toys, a division of Columbus-based Big Lots, in 2000. Romney had left Bain by then but was still a major investor. KB went bankrupt in 2004, emerging from Chapter 11 protection in 2005 under new owners, Columbus Business First reported.

Bain also bought Totes, the Cincinnati-area umbrella company, in 1994, and merged it with Isotoner. That deal was considered successful.

But after Bain bought a paper and office supply company, American Pad & Paper, or Ampad, from Dayton-based Mead in 1992, Ampad filed for bankruptcy protection and cut jobs, albeit eight years after the Bain purchase. Bain reportedly made more than $100 million on Ampad, and the job losses dogged Romney in later political races.

Private equity firms look for companies to buy and sell, and Bain was considered highly successful under Romney, who says it created jobs.

But Bain also had deals that didn't work out as well. The Wall Street Journal recently examined 77 Bain deals across the country and found that 22 percent of the acquired companies filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed within eight years.

Some business experts were critical of that record, but others told the Journal that Bain took on a number of deals involving companies already experiencing trouble. Turning them around created opportunities but some job losses may have been inevitable.

Gingrich, the former U.S. House speaker from Georgia, and Perry, the Texas governor, have been hammering on the pink slips during the GOP primaries, where Romney has won the first two races. Democrats say they will join in during the long 2012 election season.

"While he claims to be a job creator, he has actually spent his corporate career as a job cremator, and a proud one at that," Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern said Wednesday.

Romney's Bain record will be scrutinized in Ohio, "similar to how it has been in Iowa and New Hampshire," said Kershaw, the Obama campaign spokeswoman for Ohio.

Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul called the critics "desperate," saying, "No candidate in this race can match Mitt Romney's record and experience as a businessman and entrepreneur."

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